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Comment by bashkiddie | Hacker News Reader

I would like to second this.

In Golang if you iterate over a thousand files and

    defer File.close()

your OS will run out of file descriptors

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Well, unless you're on Windows :D Even on Windows XP Home Edition I could open a million file handles with no problems.

Seriously, why is default ulimit on file descriptors on Linux measly 1024?

Some system calls like select() will not work if there are more than 1024 FDs open (https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/select.2.html), so it probably (?) makes sense to default to it. Although I don't really think that in 2k26 it makes sense to have such a low limit on desktops, that is true.

https://0pointer.net/blog/file-descriptor-limits.html

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